A new recruit joins Sam & Max for the first time. They put you through a series of trials to test your abilities. The trials involve playing minigames in an abandoned amusement park, and periodically a commissioner calls to seek your help in tackling big cases. The formula persists throughout Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual, until the last battle.
Apart from the baseball minigame, the rest are standard: escape rooms, climbing, throwing, shooting, etc. In addition to the shooting gallery that doesn’t register shots on targets, the bomb defusal challenge, which is too hard because of item manipulation and the challenges are too long, almost everything lacks polish. An innocent collection of mediocre minigames marred by technical issues.
As a result of the “cases” that take you away from the amusement park, collision detection is a major problem. Because you can fall through so many surfaces, you can get trapped in a cycle of the screen going black and attempting to reset you. Teleporting is better, but it’s still not great. You won’t teleport to what you select, instead, you end up vaguely in the ballpark of your target, making precision tasks infuriating. You must constantly bend out of camera range to pick up dropped items.
Most lines hit the mark, and Sam and Max’s references to pop culture and dark humor are constants. The script is sharp and remarkably funny. Despite the game’s technical shortcomings, we laughed at numerous quips, at least once every three hours. A bright spot in an otherwise frustrating game, is the characters and world endure.
Pros:
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Characters we love.
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Humorous script.
Cons:
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Awful collision detection.
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Registration not always successful.
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Minigames are dull.
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It’s a pain to manipulate items.
Five over ten for this game.
